“In their own time, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin were not ‘classics,’ but just normal men. No one who picked up a copy of Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk would have guessed that he bore in hand a work by the future author of The Brothers Karamazov. We can only grasp this classic literature through its contemporariety.”

It’s impossible to know which authors will be held in high esteem in the future, but we can help steer public opinion.

________________________

Mo’s literary legacy offers a rare window into this larger cultural-political mission, and to judge him by his public actions neglects much that can be learned from his work, which traces China’s history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.